Learning To Fly
by superlabelgirl
Summary: Tavros thinks that it's time to finish things how they started.  Rated T for violence, emotional abuse, suicidal thoughts.  Please R & R.


(I don't know why I feel the need to write sadstuck, but if anyone deserves it then it is Tavros. I am planning to write more to this, so let me know if there is any interest as well as critiques, if you have them. Homestuck is owned by Andrew Hussie.)

Tavros Nitram grips the arms of his four wheeled device and looks at the ground below. It's rough and hard and a long way down, and that's all right, that's perfectly all right. His uniform crinkles against his body, long unworn, a little too small now. The pants feel strange against his damaged robotic legs. They begin to rip again on his sharp mechanical edges, making long shed bloodstains become all the more obvious. Unlike Pupa Pan, he has grown and changed since the last time he wore these clothes, a little bigger and a lot more broken. But that's all right too, because the circle is about to be close and things will be neat and clean again. What can he say? He's a fan of symmetry, of ending things how they started. Except this, at least, will be his own decision.

The spaces between then and now almost match up. Almost, but not quite. His changes are the only imperfection. The place, at least, looks the same as it did when things began. The cliff is more constant than he could hope to be. The view from the bottom looks just the same as it did when the uniform fit. He smiles, just a little. Even if the others are gone, even if he has grown blocky and fractured, he sees the ground below and the sky above and knows that the beginning and end will be united by the most important thing.

The need to fly.

He had done things before the first time he found this cliff, of course. There had been time before the beginning. A time where he was young and round and soft, a time when FLARPing was just playing a game, playing pretend. In that time, Team Charge and Team Scourge had walked side by side, a friendly rivalry bound by real friendship. Aradia, a girl whose lively eyes touched something serious, whose smile curves as gently as her horns, was his teammate and his closest friend. Terezi, in contrast, was all sharp points, elbows and ribs and a wide smile with neatly pointed teeth, and she laughed in a way that cracked with electricity and made Tavros feel alive. And then, of course, there was Vriska. She was the clouder against him, bold and fearless, grinning like the world was hers for the taking. She pushed him forward, told him he'd be good one day, punched him in the arm but not enough to hurt, not yet. He felt a slight tugging of fondness for her that could have been red had it not been crippled as well.

But he doesn't count those times as more than a prologue. Although he wasn't more than a couple sweeps older now, that soft and smiling boy is no longer anything that he can relate to. No, the beginning was here, with his clouder, pushing him too hard as usual. Only now he couldn't win, and she pushed him to decide how to lose. Aradia and Terezi were not responding, and with nothing separating him from Vriska, something in her smile became predatory. Something about her gaze made him feel like a fly in a web, so he decided to back down instead of struggling helplessly until she ended him. "Weaky weaky weak," she said, disappointed in him before crawling into his mind and making him move in a direction that wasn't escape.

He felt her slip in, unwelcome, but could not stop her as her voice hummed pleasantly in his mind, told him he was just like Pupa Pan. That he could fly. The bottom of the cliff was barely a thought for him then, so freely did she give him the sky. She moved him to the edge without his protest, urging him to finally take what he wanted. "Fly, Pupa, flyyyyyyyy!" she shouted into his head as his body leapt over the edge.

For a moment, he was flying. But the fall came, as it always does. She withdrew her power from him as soon as he started to fall, just as quickly and sharply and sickeningly. She left only her laughter in his mind as he plummeted to the suddenly real ground, all blood and pain and unnatural angles as he hit and slipped into a black that he was sure was death.

That was how it began.

When he woke up, he realized that he was not dead. He still hurt, but his legs now felt numb, absent. He tried to move them, and could not. Aradia and Terezi still wouldn't respond, and Karkat was just as uncaring as ever. He woke up Tinkerbull, who had fallen asleep by his side, and sent him to go get help. He began to try to drag himself home, tearing up his clothes and leaving a trail of brown blood after him like a slug. He didn't get very far before Tinkerbull returned with Aradia, who somehow found the strength to carry him back to his hive. He apologized softly for the trouble as tears slowly slid down her face, all of her set with a hardness that he could not place.

He runs his fingers along the armrests of his device again, which he had come to know and resent and care for. Aradia and Terezi helped him pay for it, refusing to let him continue to drag himself around his hive. Days passed. Terezi's and Aradia's smiles faded to flatness as Vriska laughed and played on, unrepentant. The seriousness in Aradia's eyes grew until she told Tavros, kneeling before him in his device, that Vriska had to pay. Tavros argued against it. It was enough that he was broken, he did not want this spreading to his friends like a crack creeping through glass. Aradia only said that she would be bodily unharmed and mentally reformed. Then she left, leaving him no way to retort. He could not go after her.

He sighs slightly. He had not known at the time that this "mental reform" would be letting Vriska be tormented by her former victims, their ghosts tied to Alternia by the cruel ways in which she had murdered them. He had not known that Vriska would be so shaken by this that she added Aradia to their shrieking numbers. He did not learn this until he saw Sollux carrying her damaged body, his eyes looking as helpless as Tavros felt.

Just like that, Aradia was gone. His close friend was gone because he had not been able to stop her. She was gone completely until she came back all wrong, no curving smiles, no sparkles of excitement catching in her eyes, only that emptiness. It was as if the serious part of her had flooded out and nothing else was left. When she told him so emotionlessly of the nature of her death, full of first person detail, her words made him feel like he was falling again, falling somewhere dark and deep and just waiting for the ground to break him. He couldn't bring himself to talk to her much anymore.

As much as Vriska murdering Aradia had hurt him, as much as the mere thought of it made him feel choked and twisted inside with his own miserable helplessness, what happened with Terezi was worse. While seeing Aradia's broken body had made him want to scream his insides out, at least he hadn't had to _watch_ it happen, to _make_ it happen. He had been sitting alone, doing nothing at all, when Vriska forced her way into his mind, prying forcefully when he said _nO, sTOP._ Vriska's mind had felt all bloody and ready to make the world bleed with her.

She turned his ability to communicate with animals into something vengeful. She made him move into Terezi's lusus's mind, made her walk Terezi into the sunlight with the sweet deluded belief that this mental bond was controlled by her lusus alone. She made him call out through her lusus's mind, telling Terezi to open her eyes and stare up into the sun. In a strange telescoping of minds, he felt her go blind, felt himself go blind, and felt Vriska's laughter echo through him again. Then as quickly as she came, Vriska was gone. He sat alone in the ringing silence and vomited at what he had seen, what he had done, until there was nothing left in him but trembling and weakness.

Sometimes he thinks that from that moment on, he never got anything back.


End file.
